On the 27th of July, Ikea finally opened their new Dublin store. Huge crowds were wowed by the size of the store and the value for money available but few knew what was going on under the surface.
An Aermec ground source heat pump is installed to meet all of Ikea’s heating and cooling requirements a massive 1500 kW of heating or cooling together with 300 kW of hot water for washing facilities. A heat pump was decided upon as IKEA is committed to reducing the environmental impact of all its operations and it set high standards for the new store.
The heat pump has an open-loop system design. Four 200m deep wells were sunk on the site, 550mm in diameter and 120m apart. Two of these are used to extract sub-aquifer water from sandstone rock beds deep below the service while the remaining two return the water to the aquifer. Heat transfer is carried out using a heat exchanger to ensure the integrity of the surrounding environment is not compromised. The Coefficient of Performance (COP) for the system is calculated to be between 3.5 and 4, meaning that for every unit of electrical energy used, 3.5 to 4 units of energy are extracted thanks to the energy removed from the geothermal system. This is a significant improvement on the COP of 0.95 to 0.98 of a modern condensing gas fired boiler.